I intended to expand last week’s story on vegan cooking with information about desserts, in particular. Until the story’s example of vegan sweets turned sour.
Actress Alicia Silverstone’s vegan cookbook may be dubbed “The Kind Diet,” but her Coffee-Fudge Brownie recipe wasn’t so kind to readers who, enticed by the photo with last week’s story, rushed into the kitchen to whip up a batch. I received two frantic e-mails from readers who watched the brownies overflow the pan and burn to the bottom of their ovens. Both swore they had followed the recipe to the letter. Yikes!
But the truth wasn’t far off. The Jacksonville reader later admitted she had interpreted the ingredients loosely and took liberal license with some substitutions: white flour for whole-wheat, coconut milk for soy or rice milk and “sugar in the raw” for maple sugar. Aha!
I likewise asked the second reader if he used maple sugar rather than maple syrup, which I theorized could be easily confused and obviously would ruin the entire recipe. Because he never responded, I’m assuming he and his Medford family realized their error. It doesn’t help that maple sugar is obscure and very, very, very expensive.
I called Ashland Food Co-op’s baking guru Mary Shaw, who agreed that although Silverstone’s was a “funky” recipe, the proportions of wet and dry ingredients should still produce a brownie-like substance. She agreed to replicate it and report back. I heard this morning that her version, minus 1/2 cup of the coffee, went off without a hitch.
I already had planned to test it in my own kitchen to either reassure readers it worked or to chastise The Associated Press test-kitchen crew for sending me a recipe that didn’t. Luckily, I had a 5-pound bag of whole-wheat pastry flour purchased against holiday baking that I never accomplished. The brown-rice flour and soy milk were easily obtained at Food 4 Less, and I can see why these ingredients may be attractive to someone who isn’t even vegan. Whole-grain flour, nondairy milk, canola oil — these brownies certainly qualify as more healthful in some respects.
The only sticking point for me was that darned maple sugar. If I had purchased it, these would have been a $15 batch of brownies, and that I couldn’t conscience. Apparently hard-core vegans don’t use cane sugar because it’s sometimes filtered with charcoal made from animal bones. Some sources I consulted on the Internet proclaimed the process so pure that cane sugar meets kosher standards, so it sounds like pure ideology on the vegan end.
Mary assured me I could use brown sugar, but not in the same quantity. Cane sugar is sweeter than maple sugar, she said. It also gives off steam in baking whereas maple sugar does not. I decided that a good compromise was to use half the amount of brown sugar as maple sugar and, to keep the dry-wet ratio the same, less than half the quantity of brewed coffee, which Mary and I thought this recipe contained in excess. I also added about a teaspoon of vanilla to balance out the flavors.
You may ask how I could get away with substituting when the afore-mentioned readers couldn’t. I’m no baking guru myself, but one of the first lessons I learned from Mary while writing a story for Oregon Healthy Living magazine on adapting traditional methods of baking is to only substitute one ingredient per recipe. More than that, and you’re setting yourself up for disaster.
And my brownies decidedly were not a disaster. Forewarned by my beleaguered readers, I set the pan atop a baking sheet should they overflow. But these puffed up and formed a nice, crumbly crumb, a little drier than I prefer in a brownie, but I couldn’t be sure if that’s from overbaking or just the lack of saturated fat. As Mary is fond of saying, there’s nothing that can really replace an egg in baked goods.
To remedy that, I melted down some chocolate truffles my sister-in-law had made for Christmas and smoothed it on top for a frosting. Purchasing vegan “butter” for Silverstone’s glaze definitely was not in the cards. Nor was an additional serving of soy milk. These “kind” brownies went down just fine with a glass of moo juice.
For some foolproof vegan desserts, consider attending chef Jeff Hauptman’s “Vegan Valentine” class on Feb. 11 at the Co-op. He’ll prepare hemp milk-almond panna cotta; chocolate mousse pie with seed-and-nut crust; gluten-free carrot cake; whole-wheat apple strudel with coconut-caramel sauce and raw cocoa-date fudge. The class is $30 for Co-op owners, $35 otherwise. Register online or call 541-482–2237.
